


tell me again

by PoeticallyIrritating



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 04:55:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7208612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/pseuds/PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shaw and the Machine, talking about Root—and what it means that the Machine took her voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me again

**Author's Note:**

> post “the day the world went away.” disregarded in the name of emotional processing: the events of the following episodes, where exactly they are, what exactly is going on in the background.

When she hears Root’s voice again for the first time, her hand jumps—not to her earpiece, where the voice is coming from—but to the well-worn spot just behind her left ear. The skin is smooth and she can feel her skull underneath, the slight protrusion of the mastoid process uninterrupted by inorganic matter or scar tissue.

“Root?” she whispers, hoarse. For an instant she almost lets herself believe. Not like it’s never happened; not like Sameen herself hasn’t risen from the ashes like a pissed-off phoenix.

“No, Sameen.” The voice sounds almost tender.

It doesn’t take her long to figure it out, and when she does, she tears out her earpiece and throws it down onto the sidewalk, grinds it into the cement with her heel and walks away.

A blocked number is calling her phone. She ignores it.

-

Reese finds her in an alley, sitting on top of a dumpster with her heels kicking against it. She wasn’t trying to hide; her phone is still in her back pocket. He looks at her with that expression she hates, something like sympathy.

He holds out a new earpiece, flesh-colored and made to be invisible. “We need to keep in touch with you.”

She holds up her phone. “Text me.”

There’s that face again. “Shaw—”

“I’m not listening to that thing talk in her voice.”

She can see him about to say something stupid, something like _Root loved it, maybe you should give it a chance._ She’s not sure if she wouldn’t slam him against the wall in response. (It sounds good, right about now. The thought of hurting someone.)

Instead he looks at her with an infuriatingly knowing expression and says, “Fine. I’ll text you.”

He leaves the earpiece beside her on the dumpster. Sameen pockets it.

-

They go on that way for a while. Reese and Fusco text her instructions, and it’s a little cumbersome but they make it work. Reese texts like he talks—it seems like periods are the only punctuation he knows. Fusco has been experimenting with text speak but he’s not very good at it; he still thinks that “lol” stands for lots of love.

She finally picks up the phone for Reese because his name is right there and his logistics texts are getting novel-length. It’s a twenty-second phone call, she writes down a security code, and then she hangs up.

The Machine jumps into the silence. “Sameen?” it says, Root but not Root, and Sameen throws her phone across the room.

“You’ll have to talk to me eventually,” it says, volume all the way up, tinny and static-filled.

“No I won’t.”

“You already are, sweetie,” says the Machine in Root’s teasing voice, and Sameen grits her teeth so hard they feel like they might shatter. People do that—shatter their teeth—but usually when they’re doing some epinephrine-fueled car lifting to save a child. She wonders if anyone's ever cracked a molar from sheer rage.

She picks up the phone from the floor and slams it down on the table in front of her. She’s kind of hoping it’ll break.

It doesn’t.

“Fine,” she says, “what do you want to talk about?”

“I need access to you,” says not-Root. The Machine.

“Use your all-seeing eye,” Shaw snaps. “You have enough damn cameras around.”

“We’re reaching the end of the war, Sam,” she says, and she sounds so much like Root that Sameen’s chest feels like bursting with something she can’t identify, some complicated emotion that makes her want to crawl out of her skin. “Limiting me will only make things worse.”

“That voice isn’t yours,” Sameen says, through gritted teeth. Her arms are crossed, nails digging into biceps. One of her fingernails has a sharp point from where she broke it—nail files aren’t exactly dime a dozen in apocalyptic New York City—and it feels like it might be breaking skin.

“Sameen,” says the Machine, and makes a _tch_ sound that seems utterly human. “I made a choice to honor her sacrifice.”

Sameen lets out a long, shuddering breath. “How much of her is you?”

She’s thinking of how she learned to categorize the body into systems: muscular, skeletal, lymphatic, nervous. Et cetera. She was good at it, better because she didn’t have the sentimentality about the body or the mind that other people seemed to. Like the kid who interrupted one of her neuro classes in undergrad with, “So are you saying emotions are just chemicals reacting in your brain?” He was so affronted by it, the idea that humanity could be reduced to a collection of chemical pathways. Sameen never had a problem with it. She never felt like humanity was such a sacred thing to begin with. But now—there’s no way to explain it except that she doesn’t believe that Root could be reduced to one of a billion functions in the Machine’s overloaded circuits.

“My voice, my personality, is ninety-nine point six percent accurate to hers. Most of her memories are my memories as well.”

“Then what makes you different?” It comes out like a threat, low and dangerous.

“You mean besides the point-four percent?” She’s teasing now, and Sameen hates it.

There’s a pause.

“Consciousness,” says the Machine.

Sameen waits for elaboration, but there is none. “You’re not her,” she says.

“I never asked you to believe that I was.” The Machine sounds—tender, almost.

Sameen hangs up. It’s an essentially useless gesture, but the Machine honors it, going silent.

It’s a long pause, a long set of strung-together moments in a silent room. Sameen can hear her own heartbeat, just slightly faster than the clock ticking on the wall.

“You cared about her,” she says into the air.

The Machine crackles back onto the speakerphone. “I loved her.”

Sameen bites the inside of her cheek. She almost feels like laughing. Who but Harold Finch would teach an artificial superintelligence how to _love?_ It’s like a bad sci-fi novel.

Maybe the Machine learned on her own, which seems even more ridiculous. Sameen finds herself remembering what Root used to say—about how humans are an accident of biology, but the Machine exists by design. It doesn’t work that way, though. Root seemed to figure that out too: a flawed creator equals a flawed creation.

It’s fucked up, isn’t it? She wants to laugh again. A robot that can love (“not a robot, Sameen,” Root corrects in her head) and a human who can’t, trapped in a room together talking about the woman who loved them both.

 _I loved her._ The Machine’s words, eerie in Root’s voice, echo in her head. “I wanted to,” Sameen says.

“She knew,” says the Machine.

Sameen fishes the earpiece Reese gave her out of her pocket and fits it into her ear. “All right,” she says. “Let’s take these bastards down.”


End file.
